Colour Vision: #3C78A7

I’m having one of those weeks. Just when I think things can’t get any more complicated, I go to sleep and wake up to find they’ve become even more screwed up. I’m like the little girl in Labyrinth, and David Bowie just keeps taunting me with his glass ball. I’m interested to see how this affects this week’s Colour Vision piece; suffice to say I’m not expecting a fairytale.

This week’s colour is #3C78A7, and was selected by Ms Gourmantic of the excellent Gourmantic.com food and travel web site.

Having the colour selected for me is a first for the series, and something I’m keen to explore.

Finally, before we delve into the feature, I’m sure I’ll be featuring more colours selected by fellow travel lovers over the coming year, which will be by invite only. Please don’t send me unsolicited suggestions or I’ll throw you into the Bog of Eternal Stench.

You’re the colour of a child’s sky: a haven where the sun does not have to be round, and the clouds do not have to bring rain. A place where birds are as big as aeroplanes, and innocent lines, become blinded by glitter, and recoil into a tangle of helpless scribbles.

One, two, three. Breath in.

Everybody now. Deep breath, in. And exhale.

Deep breath in, and exhale. And in, and…

#3C78A7 just passed through us, and you can feel it, just slightly. A faint residue of air stroking your lungs.

So, come on Mr. Blue Sky, show your face. Where have I seen you before?

A hyperlink to a long forgotten web page? Perhaps I met you in an internet café in Madurai? Perhaps that’s it.

Perhaps I clicked you and you’ve come back to take your revenge. I didn’t mean to click you so hard, but you demanded I did: you said click here.

So I clicked, and I clicked, and I clicked, until I could not click any more.

And this is how you thank me? You’re nothing to me; and you call yourself a link?

You’re so lucidly neutral.

Flat. Yet firm. A raft of silence floating atop the noise of my life.

It’s so easy to see a blue, and think of sea and sky. Yet #3C78A7 is making me sad. Like it knows something I don’t. Like where you’re really from, or who you really are.

Despite its plainness, #3C78A7 has an aura which is somewhat calming. I am suddenly its child. I hear it as a trickle. I feel it soothing and supporting me.

Perhaps the child was right, perhaps you are not the sky, perhaps you are the sea. You are the sea I drew a thousand times, while I grew up in the middle of that island.

The sea I yearned to cross in order to explore these trails of mine. I painted you in innocence, and now your tides come in.

#3C78A7, you are my sea, and yes, it seems, you are my most important link.

Writing this week’s Colour Vision piece was such an interesting project for me. Every episode of this series has been written in one bolt, a flash of inspiration and I’m gone.

Not this one however.

I know why, and it’s because I was gifted the colour by Ms. Gourmantic, as appose to randomly selecting it myself.

It changed the playing field; suddenly I wasn’t just looking for emotions and experiences that would link me to this colour, but I was looking for the emotions and experiences which would link me, and could link Ms. Gourmantic to it.

It was as though, somehow, she was looking over my shoulder, despite me never having met her. I had to change my approach, but eventually, at the second attempt I learned to brush her off my shoulder, and find the portal I was looking for.

It appeared the colour was too shy to talk, with someone else in the room.

I’d really like to hear your feelings towards this week’s Colour Vision piece; perhaps the colour has a particular resonance with you? Share your thoughts below, and help me to understand my readership.